


Agape

by LadyCharity



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Love, Mythology References, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 13:10:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19992757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyCharity/pseuds/LadyCharity
Summary: Of all the living beings, Persephone thought bitterly, it should be the gods who were most pitied.In which the gods struggle with their faith.





	Agape

**Author's Note:**

> YIKES  
> I just really wanted to write this. Should I have published it? Should I have subjected innocent eyes to this? my ego says yes but my conscience says eeeeek

The screech of hungry birds reminded Persephone of a train whistle. Their shameless ruckus caused the hairs on her nape to stand, her chest tingling with anticipation. She did not know if it was excitement or fear. For one who had lived as long as she, there gradually became no difference between the two.

She would pause in the middle of her work, fingernails lined with dirt and her knees stained with grass, and she would lift her head from the fields, scanning the horizon for the belching smoke of a train. The low-hanging clouds ripe with rain would sometimes trick her eyes, but the birds would caw again and her frozen heartbeat would pick up its pace. 

Dionysus would watch her curiously. He walked the vineyards with Persephone most summers, trailing after her like student to teacher. Before he could ask her what she had heard, she would flash him a smile and dare him to fatten the grapes to the point of bursting. 

Even the firstfruits of spring made her think of her husband. Persephone was beginning to realise that there was no escaping his metropolis. 

Dionysus was a beanpole of a lad, his skin the rich shade of mahogany and the soles of his bare feet stained with the fruits of his labor. Persephone had first found him among her fields with his retinue of hollering women who cut their fingers on the strings of mandolins day and night.

When she was not looking, he had strung grapevines across her thick garden. She caught him crushing a palmful of grapes in his hand and letting the juices streak down his knuckles, and he looked up to Persephone with triumph. Persephone was not immediately charmed. She had pruned and weeded these fields, and had to bid farewell each winter and pray that the frost did not murder the roots. The land was not for free, and these fruits were not her own. 

“These are my fields, boy,” she said. “Go find your own.” 

It was not unusual for humans to come and go through her forests to fill their stomachs. She delighted in feeding them until they were bursting with life and energy to work and live alongside her. This young god was an exception, for his Maenads crushed the grapes under their feet and soaked the soil with the juices.

“You’re the queen of the underworld, aren’t you?” he said.

She smiled wryly. He must be an achingly young god. He did not yet have the chill of Olympus on his skin. 

“Persephone is my name,” she said. “And who are you, little god?” 

“Dionysus,” he said. He looked about him, unaffected by his entourage who screamed with laughter and haunted songs. “You’ve got a fine garden. A pity that it can’t last all year round.”

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” she said. 

The young man smiled. He collected the juices in a tarnished flask, which fermented along his skin and collected into a distinct perfume in the lines of his palm. Persephone reached over to pluck a purple marble from the bunch and bit into its glassy crunch. It reminded her of her husband’s pomegranates, if they were still plump with youth.

“Not bad,” she said. She gave him an appraising look. “Are you one of Demeter’s as well?” 

He told her his story, or rather, he sang it to her, as his voice lilted and his story trailed with childlike distraction. By the end of it, Persephone gathered that he was more of a demigod, that he was not on Hera’s good side (but who ever was?), and that he was fond of teaching the humans to cultivate the grapes. There too was dirt under his fingernails, and his hair smelled of scorching sunlight. His fingers were sticky with the juice that made Persephone lightheaded just breathing it in. 

“I couldn’t grow these grapes until you returned from Hades,” he said. “Actually, I couldn’t _be_ until you returned from Hades.”

“What sort of riddle is that?” said Persephone. 

He hummed noncommittally before taking a swig of his flask. His face brightened and he held it to Persephone. She sniffed at the flask; the smell was sour and sweet and everything in between. It both repulsed and intrigued her, and when she took a sip, she felt the sun shine down her throat. 

“You like it?” he said. 

“Where did you learn to set fire to water?” she said. 

He grinned. 

“It tastes like my field,” she said. “Like my earth.” 

“You keep it,” he said, when she held the flask up to him. 

Persephone had tasted that sort of heat, not from drink but from passion, from marriage. Like celebration bottled up in a little glass. 

“You’d give it so freely to little old me?” she said.

He smiled. “Take it with you when you go,” said Dionysus. “So you can bring some of your spring into winter as well.” 

He pushed the flask back to her, and she could feel his youth at his fingertips. This weighed heavy on her heart, because his touch was like that of a child, or of the thorns of her flower bushes, the ripening heads of grain; she could tell he was ephemeral. 

What good is being a god, Persephone thought bitterly, if they could not overcome the passage of time? 

Persephone and Hades did not have children of their own right now. It was not for a lack of trying, and although they had eternity to continue, they attempted with a little less hope and a little more cynicism, to prove to themselves once more that they were unable to conceive and lick their bitter wounds afterwards. Sometimes Persephone questioned if they bothered trying so that Hades could turn making love to her into something productive, even if to no avail. 

Hades would not say it so blatantly, but he blamed himself. He would stroke Persephone’s hair afterwards with such heavy gentleness as if his touch was an apology. She was always the fruitful one except in this. Persephone would not say it so blatantly either, but sometimes in the dead of night, when the metal cogs creaked outside their home and rattled not from the wind but from immeasurable pressure and coal, she would blame him too. 

In the mornings, or what Hades decided would be morning, he would flip the switch to the generator that conducted a metallic sunrise over his foundry. He would turn his head towards Persephone and open his mouth, and she would wait with bated breath for what tender words and confession would come from his mouth. But defeat, or resentment, or simply tiredness would win him over instead, and he would button his waistcoat and turn to the factory floor. She would lie in bed and drink from the boy-god’s flask, and find that the fire of the fruit burned hotter in her than passion for her husband that morning. 

So when she found Dionysus wandering on the earth, she took him under her wing. She taught him the acidity of the soil, the choicest of rainfall, the art of feeding several thousand. He showed her his arts proudly, grapes as dark as blood or as pale-green as drops of dew, plump like stones or tiny as a cluster of sea foam bubbles. She introduced him to the mossy nymphs, tolerated his Maenads, and taught him all that he asked, until he started asking her about the underworld. 

“Tell me about it,” he said, as they sat under a heavy-laden tree during the rain. The leaves filtered the rain over their heads, until only a thin layer of mist coated their faces. “About your kingdom under the soil.” 

Persephone sucked the meat of the grape through its crisp skin. She swept her hand towards the rolling hills of overgrown grass and weeds, the olive trees and fig trees. 

“My kingdom is right here,” she said. “Rooted in the dirt.” 

He would smile and let her get away with it, but only for a couple of days before he would ask again. 

“What goes on in your underground utopia?” he said. 

“Dormant seeds sleep until I call them awake,” she said. “Make me more of that green grape juice, brother.” 

She liked how the wine coaxed laughter and stories out of her, from even the deepest crevices that she thought could not be reached. Even the humans were amusing after they tasted the wine, filled with reverence and unearned confidence that the drink seemed to turn even mortals into gods in the head and heart. When the humans took their first sips of Dionysus’ drink, they threw festivals and lavish weddings and toasted life, and he would conduct his women followers in song and story, until the humans who joined thought themselves the heroes in their own tales, wearing masks of ruddy cheeks and imagination.

She collected any drop she could draw from Dionysus in flasks, in old bottles and heavy canteens. She thought that maybe the workers down below would appreciate it. They would have never tasted anything like it. 

“Is it lonely down there?” said Dionysus. “Death?” 

Persephone laughed coldly, so that the chill could numb the ache in her chest that she pretended she did not have. 

“You have no idea,” she said.

Hadestown was once a masterpiece, but that was long ago. Before the factories, Hadestown was clean and quiet, with only the sound of the flowing river before it had been dammed up and covered away. Before the electricity, the walls were intricately painted with the pigments found deep in the stones and ancient bones. The smoke had long covered them up by now. Specks of gold used to wink from the riverbed. By now they had been sucked dry.

The frosty smell of the place used to remind Persephone of her husband. Now the air smelled like sweat and sulfur. 

In the outskirts of Hadestown, old-fashioned mills and water wheels were abandoned to their lazy rotations, now that Hadestown had traded its pastoral technology for machines. This was where Persephone preferred, if she must. If you brought a bright enough lantern, you could still see the faded paintings left behind in the old walls. They may still glimmer in the light. 

There were no more pigmented clay or rich vermilion left to use, or at least no one had the time or energy to look for it anymore, with their hands busy on the pickaxes and conveyor belts. Sometimes Persephone crushed beetles above ground and collected beeswax to add a little color of her own, and she would kneel by a bare patch of wall to remind herself of the colours blue and green. The halogen glare of Hades’ garish sun did not reach her here, which suited her fine because contrary to popular belief, she missed the dark. 

She scraped her paintbrush across the grains of the stone, etching a dull blue onto the walls. She had not brought enough with her, and she did not want to think about how she was to spend the rest of the six months. 

A gust of clean cold overcame her, and for a moment Persephone thought that the River Styx was rearing its old and hidden head again. She looked up from her work, and saw with a tangled mess in her chest that it was Hades. 

“This is where you run off to?” Hades said. 

Persephone clenched her jaw. She wiped her paintbrush on the hem of her dress. She felt a twinge of guilt, because it was a lavish silk dress that he had purchased for her, and now it was rumpled and streaked with dull paint. She couldn’t deny, though, that this fit her better. 

“If you wanted to paint,” said Hades, “you could have told me and I’d have the paper mill make you all sorts of canvases.” 

“I don’t want any canvas,” she said. “These old rocks suit me fine, thank you.” 

Hades stepped closer. He had a flashlight in his hand, and when he set it down on the ground to give Persephone light, she flinched.

“Get that out of my face,” she said. 

“This is too dark,” said Hades.

“And that’s blinding. What, are lanterns not good enough for you anymore?” 

Hades’ jaw twitched. He took the flashlight back. 

“Where did you get that?” he said. 

“What?” said Persephone.

“That.” He gestured to the blue paint that she had in a little mason jar, oil and crushed beetles mixed together to make a pigment. 

“Up above,” said Persephone. “I brought it with me, seeing as you’ve long run out of your paints.” 

“We’ve run out centuries ago,” said Hades. 

Persephone ground linseed oil for a turpentine more forcefully than before. 

“I’d like to show you something,” said Hades.

“I’m busy,” said Persephone. 

“It would only be for a moment, wife,” said Hades. “I’d like for you to see.” 

Tenderness forced its way into Persephone’s chest. She loved her husband, after all, and hated the work of his hands. Just because the line blurred between the two did not mean her love no longer existed. She pushed aside her jar of linseed oil and gathered herself to her feet. She let herself take his arm. 

Before, when the earth was still young as well as the ground below, when Hades told her that he wanted her to see something, he would take her to the deep caves of the Underworld that glittered with gypsum flowers that grew on their own accord, or the echoing corridors that echoed like their own cathedrals. It was not like her home above ground, but that was what once mystified her, that darkened forest with stalagmites for trees. 

But now, as Hades led her back to the heart of Hadestown, the smell of oil and sulfur clogged her breath, and the work lights made her eyes sting. It seemed to rain slick oil onto their heads, and Persephone could not shake off the itching, lingering sensation of it crawling down her hair. 

The mines that Hades showed her cracked apart the ground beneath their feet. Jets of iron water carved out lines to saw open the earth, and workers crawled through the lines like ants, their fingertips dulled from digging in the dirt. They were digging for emeralds, the stones cloaked in unpolished coarseness, wet with the sweat of the miners’ grime. The smell of it made Persephone’s stomach turn, and the machinery made the ground. 

Hades bent down to pick up a large emerald from one of the miners’ collections. It was a a dull, pale green, but she could still tell that it would gleam like tears when cut. It was larger than her palm. Hades gently held open Persephone’s hand and pressed the emerald into it. It was still warm from the core of the earth, as if freshly dead. 

“Here,” said Hades. “Here is the color that you’re looking for. We have some green down here, too.” 

Persephone looked down at the stone in her hand. Up above, she planted seeds in the garden for them to burst forth with life. Here below, the dead buried the dead, and unearthed them once again. 

Perhaps it was the smell that was getting to her. Perhaps it was the long, long day she was having, or rather the short day and long night as it was for winter. It was many a thing, and she thought it was only one. She shoved the emerald back into Hades’ hand. 

“Keep your green,” she said. “I don’t care for this shade.” 

Hades stilled. Persephone drew her fur shawl closer around her shoulders, even though sweat gathered. She did not want to look Hades in the eye; she was too self-righteous to tempt guilt. The earth creaked underneath them and the air was stale, and she wanted nothing more than to jump into the cool waters of the River Styx, before it was the oiled and polluted sludge that it was now. 

“Will my love never be good enough for you, Persephone?” Hades said. 

Persephone did not know what to say. The silence seemed to draw a heavy curtain between them. She turned on her heel to walk away, a phrase that sounded more in control than to run away, which is what she truly meant. She tried to face forward, but she looked over her shoulder. She saw Hades tiredly lower himself onto an empty crate, cradling the rock in his palm before letting it fall aimlessly to the ground. 

Her heart panged. She cursed herself for looking back. 

If gods were the makers of truth, what did it mean when she made a mistake? If gods were always right, what did it mean when she felt guilt? 

When she stepped out of the train from the underworld, Persephone waited. 

The poet and the prisoner were taking the long way back, and there was no telling how long it would take them. It would be an arduous journey, to walk forward and to never look back, for the poet to trust himself to be worth returning to. 

She knew that she would suffer, for putting her faith in the humans. She did not miss the heavy note in her husband’s voice when he bade goodbye, to both her and to the lovers. But she was foolish enough to try, to plead to Hades for mercy, to believe in a faith between two lovers to have another chance. 

(Hades, you let them go.

I let them try.) 

They both thought it merciful. She knew at least this much about her husband. He was frightening, he was obstinate, he was cold, but he was not cruel. She saw the glisten in his eyes when he heard her name in the poet’s song. Let the humans do what they can to rescue themselves. The gods shall not stand in the way of their salvation. 

The moon hung high in the sky when she saw a lone figure on the dusty road. She stood up from the stump on which she sat, but she did not run forward. It was dark, but she could see how slowly the figure moved, how each step tried to drag him back even when he moved forward, and she knew long before he reached her that his lover was lost. 

The poet walked as if in a daze, eerily silent. For a moment Persephone wished she could run away. This lost love was nothing she knew of, one that was torn freshly apart, still bleeding from the stumps, still aching for the ghost of a limb that was no longer there. The suffering of the gods have often been an echoing, drawn-out ordeal, living too long to expect anything else to last forever. This sort of mortal heartache was beyond her. But she stood still, until he finally stood before her, his figure wan and worn as the crescent moon overhead. 

“I messed up,” he croaked. “My lady, I messed up really badly.” 

Persephone wrapped her arms around the poet and held him tight. He crumpled under the weight of his shame in her embrace, until he felt so small she thought that she might have crushed him like a paper ball. She stayed dry-eyed while he wept, shivering in the last dregs of the winter giving way to her presence.

How is this mercy, Hades? she thought, while she held a young man’s broken heart in her hands so calloused and yet the shards still cut her. How is it mercy, to give these humans up to their own devices? How is it mercy, to force them to depend on their own strength? 

She held him until he cried no more. Winter had ended, and now there was too much work to be done. 

The train whistled, and Persephone wished that it were a bird. 

When her heart chilled, so did the air. The trees shivered until a leaf broke from is bough, and the animals fled as if the ground underneath them trembled. She was still crowned with flowers and summertime sweat, but when her shoulders slumped with resignation so did the proud grasses. 

She gathered herself onto her feet, letting her armful of wheats and weeds collapse into a heap on her boots. She could smell the smoke of the train’s coal thickening the wind. The truth was, though, that her bag was already packed, bulky now with extra bottles that she could smuggle below to the mortals. Even if Hades did catch her, she knew that she could convince him to let it slide. Raising morale, and other bullshit.

“Well, little god,” she said to Dionysus, as she bent low to hoist up her bags. He stayed kneeling in the soil, hands cupping the last of the grapes from the now bare branches. “That’s my ride.” 

He did not rise to his feet. He cradled the little grapes in his palm, pressing them together until the juice ran as thick and as dark as blood into the last of his flasks. He capped the flask tightly, and she saw that his hand trembled in the growing cold. 

“Get yourself under cover before the snow comes,” she said. “Go on, now.” 

“Do you get lonely, where you go?” said Dionysus. 

She paused. He pulled his sack coat closer around his frame as the wind picked up. His face was drawn with dread, but he did not bolt. 

“What’s the matter with you, brother?” said Persephone. 

Dionysus took Persephone’s hand into his, his fingers grasping for comfort that he would not find. It made her think of a human child, evanescent and frightened and yet terribly unyielding. His hands were warm. 

“In the winter, I have to go too,” he said. 

Persephone’s heart skipped a beat. She cupped his face, trying to find the words to ease the tremble in his lips. 

“Will it hurt?” she said. 

He did not answer, and perhaps he did not need to. There was sweat on his brow, and all mirth from the drink had drained away. 

“Come with me,” she blurted out. “My husband wouldn’t mind. The train ride is harsh, but it won’t hurt. It is wretched down there, but I’ll look after you.”

“In a heartbeat I’d go,” he said.

But he did not rise to his feet. The grapes did not grow themselves summer after summer. That was the difference between Persephone and this boy-god. Dionysus’ blood watered the frozen vines, all for the sake of quenching the humans’ thirsts and veins. It shouldn’t have been fair; Persephone blessed the crops and the flowers to grow, and it cost her nothing. Why must it cost Dionysus to bless the earth? 

“What if it doesn’t have to be this way?” Persephone pleaded. 

“But it does,” said Dionysus.

“Says who?” said Persephone. “I don’t say so. I can stay longer. My mother doesn’t say so. She could have some convincing. Hades doesn’t say so. He doesn’t care what goes on up here.” 

“I say so,” Dionysus said. “Sister, I cannot grow my fruit forever. Seeds die first before they grow.”

The train conductor whistled at Persephone, barking at her to get on board, that she was going to be late. Dionysus offered her a smile before pressing the last flask of this year’s wine to her chest. Persephone shook her head.

“You drink it,” she said. “Maybe it’ll numb the pain.” 

“I’ve saved the best for you, sister,” said Dionysus. “I’ll drink with you again, when we return.” 

The winter wind howled, echoing alongside the frenzied cries of the Maenads in the distance, their mirth now giving way to madness. 

“Find me in the future,” he said softly. 

She nodded. He squeezed her wrist before turning away, walking deep into the woods behind the field. As Persephone dragged herself to the train, and as Charon took her bags for her, she turned to look over her shoulder. The trees were losing their leaves with each step she took, and the sun dimmed until Dionysus was consumed in shadow. By the time she sat in her usual compartment and pulled open the window, the air was harsh and cold, and she could not see her friend anymore. 

Eurydice’s hands were slick and black with oil. Sweat wetted her face so much that they clung to her eyelashes. If Persephone did not know better, she would have thought that the girl was crying, but it was too hot down here for that. 

Her hands were burned by the searing halogen lights that Hades demanded to be installed. The very lights that he used to imitate the summer sun, which scorched and crackled over their heads, for his lady’s sake. He would throw his children under the bus for Persephone, and as that dawned upon her she mourned and resented his desperate love for her. Hades would choose her over thousands of tired souls over and over again, and she would choose just about anything over him. 

“Tell me, my lady,” Eurydice wheezed. “Does my Orpheus still sing?” 

Persephone combed her fingers through Eurydice’s grimy hair. She did not know whether she should tell Eurydice the truth. That her Orpheus had tried to throw himself from the summit of the mountain, and Persephone begged the winds to carry him to safety. That when her Orpheus pushed himself to live one more day, he crumbled upon the weight of guilt and self-condemnation on his shoulders that Persephone could not convince him to relinquish. And what could she tell him that would let him release the shame? She was no reconcilor. She could only grow him hyacinths.

“He’s still finding his voice,” Persephone said.

Eurydice swallowed hard. Even though she was no longer hunger, she was still gaunt. Even though she was no longer alive, her heart still broke. Persephone could only watch as these humans grieve, make their doomed choices that only broke them further. She could not blame Eurydice for coming to Hadestown to eat. She could not blame Orpheus for turning around at the last minute. She could not help but cry out when they did, though. 

“Don’t let me forget how it sounds like, my lady,” Eurydice said. “Please. Don’t let me forget.” 

Humans did not know how lucky they were to be helpless. They could pray to the gods for help, sacrifice to show their devotion, worship to depend on the gods for everything that they could not control. And there was nothing that they could control, not the sky, not the soil, not their friends or their enemies, so they could run to the lap of the gods like a child to their mother. 

But who did the gods go to in their vulnerability, when they were faced with their utter helplessness? Persephone wanted nothing more than to control these humans so that they wouldn’t throw themselves into self-destruction, to lose their faith and turn their heads at the last minute, but she had none. She wanted nothing than to love perfectly, rather than spit in her husband’s tokens of faithfulness, rather than stabbing himself in the back as he trusted her to follow him. 

Persephone pressed a kiss on Eurydice’s forehead. Her skin tasted of bitter salt. 

Every winter when Persephone drank the wine she brought back from the earth, she thought of her friend dying in the snow up above. 

She could never see it. She was long gone before the cold choked out the roots. But she would picture it, especially when she drank enough to let loose the bonds on her imagination. Like the perennial grapes he tended, Dionysus would, in the winter, be tortured with the inscrutable pain that came with the dying of harvest and cry— _it is done!_ —before dying alone. 

He would stay dead and long forgotten, Lord of Death who was dethroned from his role as Lord of Life, until the spring when he was reborn. Year after year, so long as the grapes demanded to be drunk, he would be ripped apart by his Maenads and reborn, ripped apart and reborn, until dying was as subtle as falling asleep. 

Persephone never asked whether Dionysus died of blood loss or of the cold. If the blood on his skin made him warm for a little while. And when he lay dying, the ground sucking dry his blood to store for later to dye the grapes, he would see the snow begin to fall from the sky and think, the sky’s falling. Then death would drain his body cold, the best of this season’s wine was saved for last. 

She raised a cup to the blank ceiling, where the smoke blackened the walls, over the heads of the people down in Hadestown that she both loved and begrudged. She thanked her friend for his gift before draining the contents of it alone, and the heat kept her company. 

What does it cost your god to love you? 

“What are you so afraid of?” Persephone asked.

She and Hades sat in the silence of the dead night. Hades had closed the factory early today. The workers were heartbroken, after Orpheus and Eurydice, and in all honesty so were the gods. They too should have known better than to pin their hopes on those no different from themselves. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Hades said.

“You do,” Persephone said. 

Their fingers were loosely linked, as if they fell together on accident. Since he had moved into an office Hades had lost the callouses that used to toughen his skin. 

“You build this wall,” said Persephone. “You don’t want anything coming in, and you don’t want anything coming out. It’s an ugly wall and you know it.” 

“It’s a strong wall,” Hades said.

“It’s a needless one,” said Persephone. “There was once a time when you were satisfied with just the river.”

“The river provides no work,” said Hades. 

“Yes it did,” said Persephone. “Remember the water wheels from the olden days? The fishing nets? You and I used to wade in the Styx, and I would hitch up my skirt and you would carry me to dry land.” 

There were no stars in Hadestown, and at one point Persephone did not need there to be. Back when the diamonds were left uncut in their place, beauty that did not need to cost money. She wished that her husband could have seen the stars, but he had plucked them out of his own sight. 

“There was once a time when people chose to stay,” said Persephone. “Before you built this wall, people chose to stay anyway.” She paused. “I chose to stay.” 

Hades’ fingers twitched, but he said nothing. Persephone reached down for the flask at her feet and uncapped it. She took a sip of it, and felt the rush of fearlessness. 

“Why didn’t you think that I would have?” Persephone said.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Hades said. “Now you can’t stand to be with me.” 

“I can’t stand what you’re doing, Hades,” she said. “What you’ve suddenly done to the place. But I miss the man you truly are. One who wasn’t afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Hades.

“Yes,” she said. “You are.” 

Perhaps the world fell apart when doubt came in. Hades once believed that Persephone loved him, that she found home in the cool corners of the underworld. Now his heart was wrought with fear, and he dug his claws into the earth as if to hold onto her love. He tore the earth apart for riches and wealth to goad her to come back to him. He tried to woo her with automobiles and steel, when in the dead of the night she missed the streaks of paint on rocky walls and their soft voices echoing in the bare caverns. 

Perhaps love would always fray when doubt came in. Even if Orpheus did not turn around too early, perhaps he would always look over his shoulders despite Eurydice being at his side. He would be tempted to steal bread for his wife’s mouth, for fear that if they skipped one meal she would be disappointed in him. That road he walked alone would never end when doubt was not banished. He would look back and look back and look back and no matter how many times he saw her by his side, he would never truly see her. He would only look past her, anxiously waiting for what he dared to call the inevitable. 

Perhaps, when doubt came in, Persephone grew bitter with dread. She saw Hadestown a hopeless case, and drank to oblivion instead. She heard the whistle of a train and cursed the conductor. She grew old with cynicism, with the doubt that grass would grow in the dirt of a grave, and cared little to see what would come next. What good was it to be a god when she knew how fallible she was, how she lacked the control to manage even herself, or the ones she loved, when she cursed herself for not trying harder for Hades and still couldn’t lift herself out of the chair? When she saw the people around her suffer needlessly and refuse to relinquish control over themselves? 

Find me in the future, Dionysus said without question, before he turned away from her and died. 

“What made you begin to doubt yourself, my love?” she said.

Hades swallowed hard. He did not pull his fingers away from her, but she could feel that they were tense, as if his limbs had gone rigor mortis like that of his workers, his so-called children. 

“I couldn’t give you life,” he said. 

My children, he called his workers, his tired and huddled souls. But they were not the children he would raise and love and teach. No, that was the coal in the ground, the hot metal poured into moulds. In those pockets of disappointment came doubt, and those pockets soon grew to chasms, to self-doubt, to the crippling fear that she would no longer love him for something that he could not control. He constructed his worth out of sheets of metal, his desire to be loved out of spitting coal. 

Her heart sank, but this truth was beloved. Because it meant she could pull out the burrs from his heart and cup it, tenderly. 

“You build this wall all around you,” she said. “So that no one can come and break your heart or leave it. You build this wall around this town so that no one would abandon you. You think you’ve built a stronghold, husband. You’ve built yourself a tomb, and you’ll be left dead inside if you don’t set yourself free.” 

Hades said nothing. She wondered if she had gone too far, and her own pulse raced with anticipation. She was not a god who could change Hades’ heart for him, who could make him believe her and shed the weight of his worth so that it did not crush him. They were both messy, fallible, troubled, failing themselves and each other. But the truth did not bend under the weight of their own follies. Truth did not change even if they doubted and wrestled and turned away from it in a fit of bitterness or fear. 

“You can’t promise me that you will stay,” said Hades.

His voice was small. Persephone squeezed his hand. 

“Nor can that wall promise you anything,” she said. 

“But I can hold it. I can see it rise up to the sky, and tell it to stop or to go.” 

“Hades, you let yourself be swayed by the things you can see. Will you be like an infant, who does not know that things can still exist even when hidden from sight? What do you need to see before you know in your heart that you are loved?”

Hades turned his pale gaze to her. She had been at his side since the beginning of the earth, and yet it felt like the first time that he could actually see her. But not her, for she had rejected him and doubted him and pushed him down in her own hurts and bitterness, but the truth that poured through her like she was a tunnel for the river to flow. His eyes shone, and she felt as if she herself had not seen him in a long time, either. 

She handed him the flask. He took it hesitantly, let the nozzle brush his lips before he took a swig of it. He handed it back to her, and she too drank from the vine. They passed the flask back and forth until the last of the wine was gone. 

Persephone stepped off the train, and new grass grew at her feet. The air was warm, and buzzing with the horseflies and cicadas. There was a tenderness in her heart as the train drew away, for part of it was still left underground, in a starry cavern freshly painted with wild vermilion. 

She dragged her suitcase through the tall wheat, still green and hard with young spring. Dewy sweat already dawned on her crown, and she held her shoes in one hand to walk barefoot along the grass. 

There was already someone in the fields, their dark head bowed in hard work. She called out to them, waving her hand with the boots. The young boy-god looked up, his face glowing from the promise of spring. He beamed at her. 

“There you are,” Dionysus said. “I knew you’d be soon.”


End file.
